The temperature hovered around the freezing mark on the night of 30 March 1950. Chaneta Holden, nine days old, lay in the incubator ward at Lincoln hospital in the Bronx. Her parents, 26-year-old Clifford and 24-year-old Anna, were at their six-room railroad flat on 131 West 116th Street in Harlem. Anna herself had only returned home from visiting the sleeping baby girl at 6.30pm, mere hours after her own hospital discharge.

Chaneta’s birth, at City hospital on Roosevelt Island, had been difficult and premature. Anna recuperated there for more than a week. The baby, however, remained there a mere 12 hours. City hospital didn’t have incubators, and Lincoln’s prenatal unit did. There Chaneta could be kept warm, the temperature steady at 96F, breathing in the oxygen pumped into the apparatus.

Chaneta weighed just 2lb 11oz at her birth, and premature babies did not survive then at the rates they do now. But being apart from their daughter allowed the couple to consider some vexing questions: how could they bring a healthy baby, let alone an unhealthy one, to their dingy, squalid apartment?

Kidnapping, reverse ransom and a bounty: the strange case of Sherri Papini

Read more

Anna spent her entire pregnancy without hot water in her home. If she needed to run a bath, she went to a friend’s house. Rat holes plugged with bottles abounded in the kitchen and bedrooms. The broken bathroom light fixtures hadn’t been replaced, but the darkness couldn’t hide the paper spread around the toilet bowl to catch droplets leaking from the ceiling. The kitchen wall was, as one newspaper report described it, “a surrealistic picture of plastic and patchwork”.

For this, Clifford and Anna paid $34 a week to their octogenarian landlord, so notorious for the squalor of his apartments that he’d already had 28 Harlem houses taken away from him by court order. To be able to live there, Clifford used a significant portion of his GI bill money, which also funded classes he took to get certified as a television repairman.

For this, the Holdens had migrated up from North Carolina, in search of a better life.

At least Chaneta was safe in Lincoln hospital’s incubator ward, five babies strong, located on the second floor of the building.

When two nurses checked in on the babies at 7.30 that night, all five babies – Chaneta the only black child – were fast asleep.

When one of the nurses, Doris Williams, checked again at just after 8pm, Chaneta was gone.

•••

New York City was supposed to be a fresh start for a woman born 25 years earlier in Youngstown, Ohio, as Evelyn Jane Blanshaw. She was the eldest of seven, and bore the brunt of her father’s strict upbringing and more than occasional beatings. Three of Evelyn’s siblings died young, and the age gap between Evelyn and her remaining sisters fostered a maternal streak that strengthened as she grew up.

But Evelyn wanted to get away from her parents and from Youngstown. She figured running away and getting married would do the trick. It didn’t. Her father, Maxie, and his wife, Elizabeth, didn’t approve of Evelyn marrying at 13, and the girl was arrested for being a runaway, placed on probation and sent home.

Two years later, when Evelyn was 15 or 16, she fell down a flight of stairs and knocked herself unconscious. Hospital x-rays didn’t find anything amiss, but Evelyn began to “have spells”, in which she would black out, shake uncontrollably and emerge in a daze. Years later these spells would be recognized as grand mal seizures, and Evelyn diagnosed with epilepsy. At the time nobody, least of all Evelyn, understood what was happening to her.

At some point in her adolescence, she developed a preoccupation with babies. She thought of them during the year she spent at the Girls’ Industrial school in Delaware, Ohio, after violating her probation for some unknown reason. She thought of them as she worked at the Atlas Powder Company and other plants as the second world war raged on, and as a domestic worker after the war ended.

A brief marriage came and went, as did what may have been an abortion and a probable miscarriage. But Evelyn’s desire for babies kept growing, bordering on the fanatic, as she boasted of pregnancy after pregnancy by man after man, despite no evidence she’d had any babies. When she was in a euphoric state, the stories were happy. When she was taciturn and moody, the stories were not. And heaven help anyone in Evelyn’s crosshairs when she drank, as she tended to do at least twice a week. Her temper could be explosive.

Evelyn lost her job as a domestic and went on unemployment insurance. It seemed like a sign to leave Youngstown and try her luck in a bigger city. She moved to New York in March 1949, probably already in the company of her common-law husband, Walter Jordan. He got a job as a porter at a midtown hotel. She found work as a chambermaid.

Over the next year, Evelyn’s baby obsession deepened. She clipped articles from newspapers, stockpiled medical books on infant care, and learned everything she could about nursing. So what if she didn’t have the qualifications? Her nursing gifts came from God. That made her better than all the other nurses. She would show them.

But Evelyn continued to drink, to seize up, to lose control of her mood. She accused Walter of being involved with other women if his eyes lingered too long on another lady. She had trouble making friends. She shaved several years off her age and went around saying she was 18. And halfway into the first month of 1950, she found two clumps of blood in her undergarments, leading her to believe she had been pregnant and miscarried twins.

Evelyn knew she was destined to be a mother. She knew she’d be so good at taking care of babies. She started loitering at hospitals all around New York just to catch a look at the newborns, her own maternal feelings roiling inside her.

Call it destiny, determination, or delusion. But something propelled her up to the Bronx on the night of 30 March.

•••

The very night Chaneta vanished, another baby also disappeared. Six-month-old Diane Ranzie was snatched from her baby carriage in a Brooklyn movie theater lobby as her mother caught a double feature. The agonizing experience ended the following morning. Diane’s abductor had probably mistaken the baby for a neighbor’s. “I’ll never take her to a movie again. Never!” cried Diane’s mother, duly chastened and grateful for a happy ending.

The Holdens had no such happy ending to their ordeal on the morning of 31 March. Even worse: doctors did not believe Chaneta could survive outside the incubator for more than a day.

Dr Marcus Kogel, the city’s commissioner of hospitals, gave Chaneta even less of a chance of surviving. “With the weather as it is tonight,” he said hours after the hospital realized the baby was gone, “she cannot survive one hour”.

The day passed by, as did the next, and still Chaneta stayed missing. A 13-state alarm went out. New York City police had a number of leads to pursue.

At first, the focus was on the Holdens. “The worst shock was when the police came to tell me about it,” Anna said at the time. “They searched my apartment. They went through my dresser drawers. Did they think I kidnapped my own child?” What was probably a routine rule-out became added trauma for Chaneta’s parents.

Evelyn Jane Blanshaw. Photograph: Life Magazine

The prenatal unit, with its incubator ward, was only a short flight up from an entrance leading to 141st Street. Anyone with a mind and sense to track when nurses checked on the babies, and when they were not around, could sneak in, snatch a baby, bundle it up and leave without being spotted.

But several witnesses spotted a woman that night.

She was in her early twenties, hovering around 5ft tall and 130lb. She wore a bright kelly green coat, a white blouse, low-heeled oxfords and a red skirt, which she took off to wrap around the baby. Shivering under her coat, she boarded an elevated train at Southern Boulevard and 143rd Street, four blocks from the hospital, and drew the attention of the conductor. She wanted to know where to buy a blanket for the baby in her arms. He suggested she catch a cab near the 125th Street stop.

The woman and baby got into the cab, driven by 25-year-old Elmer Fuller. She first directed him to a store two blocks away where she rushed in to buy a blanket and some baby clothes. Back in the cab, the woman tried to put her red skirt back on over her slip and bundle the baby in the freshly acquired blanket.

Fuller, seeing the woman’s struggle from his rearview mirror, suggested a further detour: the woman could change her skirt at the house of his friend, Beatrice Vernon, who lived on the corner of Madison Avenue and 135th Street.

The woman agreed. Fuller pulled the cab to the front and opened the door. Vernon ushered in the woman, who shook and cried as she held the baby.

“Do you think the baby is dead?” she asked Vernon, not once, but twice.

Both times, Vernon said no. The baby seemed to be breathing nicely. Later, Vernon recalled, the woman “didn’t even know how to hold the baby. Its head kept falling back until I showed her how to hold it.”

Suspicions aroused, Vernon also asked the woman what she was doing with a small baby. Didn’t it belong at a hospital? The woman claimed the baby had been born at home. “My husband shot a man in our apartment. I got frightened. So I ran away with the baby.”

And what, asked Vernon, did the woman know about feeding a baby so small?

“Maybe I’ll try with an eye-dropper.”

Vernon said: “You better get that baby to a hospital right away.” The woman said she was taking the baby to her mother.

As Mrs Vernon held the baby, the woman put her skirt back on. Mrs. Vernon gave the woman two extra blankets and a blue bunting before sending her on her way with Elmer Fuller. He drove the woman and baby to the Greyhound bus terminal on 34th Street. She said they were headed for White Plains, just south of Washington DC.

Vernon, meanwhile, took special note of the string of beads hanging from the baby’s neck, as well as a tag that read: “Girl of Holden.”

She duly reported these details to police, as did Fuller, describing his bizarre cab ride, when they read of Chaneta’s kidnapping in the papers the next day.

•••

Infant abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) noted 308 such abductions between 1983 and January 2017. (The agency didn’t start collecting data before the early 1980s.)

Of those, 11 babies are still missing. Three of them – Marlene Santana, Elias Monroy and Tavish Sutton – were snatched from hospitals. The vast majority of abducted babies are found between a day and a couple of weeks after vanishing. Periodically, much longer gaps elapse.

Stolen from hospital at birth, woman reunites with family 18 years later

Read more

This past January, Kamiyah Mobley, kidnapped from a Jacksonville, Florida, hospital soon after her birth in 1998, turned up after more than 18 years. Mobley’s case mirrored that of Carlina White, kidnapped from a Harlem hospital in 1987. White figured out the truth when she saw her baby photo on a missing persons website in 2010 and caught the resemblance to her own baby daughter.

Infants are taken from hospitals, from the street, from the home, even right from the mother’s arms. They cross class and race, rich and poor. Yet the perpetrators conform to a consistent type. They tend to be women in their childbearing years, early 20s to mid-30s. They are driven by an obsessive desire to raise a child. They have a husband or a partner and feel a baby will glue together a relationship on the precipice of breaking up.

They are compulsive, yet meticulous in planning – “they really do their homework”, said John Rabun, director of NCMEC’s infant abduction prevention unit. An even smaller number, fewer than a dozen recorded instances to date, go so far as to abduct a pregnant mother and force a delivery. One used car keys in an amateur C-section. Another employed forceps to push out the baby. Most of the mothers died in the process.

“When you talk to these women,” Rabun told me, “they are incredibly sane and hardy. They are sorry for being convicted but you can’t ascertain they are sorry for what they did. It’s a function of how goal-focused they are.”

•••

The April days ticked by, and still no sign of Chaneta. Police searched for clues along the Greyhound line, interrogating drivers, passengers, and denizens as far south as Baltimore, Washington, and Winchester, Virginia.

Detectives John J Gannon and William Mara checked out the predominately white town of White Plains, Maryland, and the more racially diverse White Plains, Virginia, for any sightings of an African American woman carrying a tiny baby.

Elmer Fuller, the taxi driver who dropped the kidnapper and baby off at the bus terminal, tagged along. He had wanted to be a cop at one point, but illness had prevented him from taking the tests. Instead, he obtained his private investigator certificate from a school run by a former NYPD commissioner. He knocked on doors and helped question those at the few black rooming houses in the small towns the police combed.

They came up empty.

Anna and Clifford Holden, meanwhile, woke up and went to sleep each day with hope draining little by little. Doctors warned them as more time passed, the chance of finding Chaneta alive dimmed. The weather remained cold. She remained a premature baby, in desperate need of consistently hot temperatures to keep living.

Anna fell ill and had to be hospitalized again. Clifford quit the television repair classes and they had to make do from his monthly GI wages. The more time passed without news of Chaneta, the worse it got for the Holdens. Never mind that there was Jerry, Chaneta’s six-year-old half-brother,to look after, and that awful apartment to maintain.

Still, they could not believe Chaneta was dead. They would not let that idea poison their minds. They spent the majority of their days glued to the radio, on the slim chance of news.

•••

Beatrice Vernon had the radio on as she cleaned her Madison Avenue apartment. It was the night of Monday, 24 April, more than three weeks since Chaneta Holden vanished from Lincoln Hospital. “Please don’t think I’m nosey,”the voice on the radio warbled. “I’m just as kind as I can be.”

Vernon liked what she heard. Where could she buy that record? She set aside her cleaning, grabbed a coat and headed over to a dime store on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Rummaging through, she found the record she wanted and asked the cashier to play it.

As Baby Boy Warren crooned the lyrics to an accompanying piano and guitar, a woman approached Vernon from behind.

“Oh, I like that record.”

Vernon turned around. It was the same woman who had come to her apartment, weeks ago, with the tiniest of babies. She had her hair combed differently and wore different glasses, but Vernon recognized her at once.

As the woman she now knew to be the kidnapper of Chaneta Holden.

Vernon caught the attention of a policeman patrolling the street near the dime store. “This is going to sound fantastic, I know, but there is a woman in that store whom I’m certain is the same woman who took that incubator baby.”

The policeman told Beatrice to go back inside the five-and-dime and keep the woman in conversation. He also asked Beatrice if she was sure this woman was the kidnapper. She hesitated. What if she was wrong?

Vernon returned to the store. The woman was still there and she seemed peeved. “That salesgirl keeps staring at me just because I have a long coat on and a dress. Well, I’m going to give her a good look.”

The woman went up to the counter. Then she saw the policeman. She fled the store and hailed a taxi.

Vernon followed right away. She caught the taxi’s license number, wrote it down, and relayed it to the policeman, who relayed it to the station. Police cars trailed the taxi to the Coburg Hotel on 215 West 34th Street, and followed the woman to a tiny room in the hotel.

When officers arrived at the room at about 9pm, they found the woman, who identified herself as Evelyn Jane Jordan, as well as a man about her age, who said his name was Walter Jordan. At first, Evelyn denied there was a baby on the premises. Then she said the baby was theirs. Finally, after hours of questioning, she broke down and took them to a room across the corridor, even smaller than the couple’s. What police saw there astonished them.

Chaneta, now 35 days old, was swaddled in an electric blanket located inside a carriage. A pan bubbled with hot water to keep the room sufficiently humid, while an electric heater made sure the room kept Chaneta properly warm at 96F.

A drawing showing how Evelyn had built a homemade incubator for the baby she had kidnapped. Photograph: Life Magazine

There were baby formulas, rubber gloves, books on child care, the medical text New Modern Home Physician, records of nursery rhymes such as Ding Dong Bell and Loosey Goosey Gander, blankets, thermometers, a piggy bank, a toy cat, and a rosary. Anything Chaneta touched was sterilized on an electric grill.

Evelyn Jane Jordan had done everything right to keep a premature baby alive in what amounted to a minuscule closet, far removed from the sophistication of a hospital incubator.

The city’s hospital commissioner, Marcus Kogel, the same man who had been certain Chaneta could not survive more than a day outside the incubator, now said it was “remarkable” the baby was alive. Lincoln hospital’s superintendent, Bernard Nadell, went further: “It’s an act of God.”

For Chaneta Holden had not merely survived in the makeshift incubator at the Coburg hotel. She had gained half a pound, now weighing 3lbs 1oz.

Late in the night, at about 2.30am, police arrested Evelyn Jane Jordan and took her back to Lincoln hospital to re-enact the kidnapping. It turned out Evelyn’s first visit to the hospital had been the night of 30 March. She had climbed the stairs to the second floor, unhooked the doors, and found herself at the incubator ward, all alone with the five babies.

She grabbed Chaneta – all the other babies were white, after all – wrapped her skirt around the baby and the bundle under her coat, hurried out the side door, and walked three blocks to 143rd Street and Cypress Avenue to catch the subway, where began her adventure with the taxi driver, Elmer Fuller, and his helpful friend, Beatrice Vernon.

While the entire city believed Evelyn had boarded a Greyhound bus to take Chaneta down south, she had merely exited the cab, gone across the street to the Coburg, and created a makeshift incubator for the baby.

Evelyn told police she had spent upwards of $10 a week on supplies for Chaneta. And she told Walter she was taking care of a baby for a friend. If he argued, her temper became ferocious. Walter had learned not to argue.

Before going to police headquarters to be booked on kidnapping charges, Evelyn asked to hold Chaneta one last time. Her wish was granted.

•••

Reunited: the Holdens see Chaneta for the first time after her kidnapping. Photograph: Life Magazine

The Holdens, shaken out of their stupor at 3am, could not comprehend the good news at first. Their baby was alive! But once they saw Chaneta, back safe at Lincoln hospital, her identity confirmed through fingerprints and footprints, the news sank in.

“My heart gave a leap of joy,” said Anna. “I grabbed my husband’s hand. He looked at me to say, ‘That’s her, all right.’ You see, I prayed. I cried many times. Even when I prayed, I had fear in my heart. And as I prayed, if they found the baby alive, I knew it would be a miracle. Thank God she is alive.”

Clifford, after taking a look at his daughter, told reporters: “She looked all right. I think she put on weight.”

As for Chaneta’s kidnapper, “I feel sorry for her,” Anna said. “Those 25 worrisome days I can forget. You see, she took good care of the baby. All the baby’s things were kept so nice and clean. The baby is larger and in good health.”

While the Holdens displayed sympathy towards their daughter’s abductor, Beatrice Vernon took a harder line about Evelyn Jane Jordan’s behavior. “She will always have that same driving, distorted mother instinct, and if she gets off lightly, she may very easily do the same thing again,” Vernon told the Pittsburgh Courier.

Chaneta’s dramatic discovery sparked a national sensation. The Times, Daily News, Journal-American, Post, and Herald-Tribune put the story on their front pages. Photographers from the papers and the wires captured the Holdens looking on at their baby girl with pride and awe as nurses held her in their arms. The news even crossed the pond, thanks to Alastair Cooke, who devoted one of his prized Letters from America BBC segments to the case.

Chaneta stayed at Lincoln hospital for several more weeks. And then those earlier vexing questions returned, bringing queasy horror. The Holdens’ apartment was in even worse shape than it had been on the night of 30 March. Clifford’s GI check for April hadn’t arrived, so they could not pay rent. Outraged neighbors held a benefit to raise money for the family. The Holdens sued the city and Lincoln hospital for $100,000, accusing them of “gross and wanton negligence”. (They dropped the lawsuit several weeks later.)

When the New York Age interviewed the Holdens on 6 May, they were heartened by the news the department of housing and buildings had filed a complaint that their apartment was “defective and unsanitary” and said fixing things was “a number one priority”. But it remained unclear whether changes would happen in time for Chaneta’s arrival home.

“I’m going to bring my baby home anyway,” said Anna. “She now weighs 4lb 6oz and I was told I could probably get her next Monday.”

When they were finally given the go-ahead, on Friday 26 May, the Holdens had a new place to live, a four-room flat at the Lincoln Houses at 1960 Park Avenue. Manhattan’s borough president and future mayor Robert Wagner, as well as his director of community relations, Thelma B Boozer, had intervened on Clifford & Anna’s behalf. Durant & Sons, a local moving firm, worked free of charge.

The Holdens brought Chaneta, who tipped the scales at just over 6lb, to their new apartment, which even had a separate nursery set up for the baby.

After Chaneta’s kidnapping and rescue, Lincoln hospital enacted safeguards to prevent such an event from happening again. But those safeguards failed on the night of 3 June 1987, when a teenage girl showed up at the neonatal ward, claimed a 19-day-old baby was her daughter, and spirited her away. Security cameras caught the kidnapping. The baby, Emily Diaz, was recovered from her abductor’s home the following night.

•••

Chaneta was safe at home with her family, but the case was far from finished.

Evelyn Jane Jordan was indicted by a grand jury on 28 April and arraigned by the Bronx County judge James M Barrett on 2 May. (Walter was absolved of all wrongdoing by the same grand jury.) He ordered Evelyn held without bond and sent to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation.

The Bellevue report, signed by the psychiatrists John Cassity and Theodore Weiss, judged Evelyn to be “in such a state of insanity as to be incapable of understanding the charge against her or the proceedings or of making her defense”.

The doctors diagnosed her as having “psychosis with psychopathic personality and an associate convulsive disorder”, noting her epileptic seizures, her erratic mood swings from talkative euphoria to sullen silence – probably symptoms of bipolar disorder – and her fantastical stories of multiple pregnancies and births, even though a gynecological exam could find no proof Evelyn had ever been pregnant.

Evelyn Jane Jordan was arrested and taken back to the hospital to re-enact her kidnapping. Photograph: Handout

Cassity and Weiss took note of Evelyn’s propensity for grandiose claims. At one point she told them: “I’m a much better nurse than the nurses or the doctors. There are many things I could tell them about babies. This comes from God.” But when she broke down and finally told the truth, that she had never had a pregnancy last a full term, let alone given birth to a child, she explained why: “If I couldn’t have them, I wanted people to think I did.”

Perhaps Evelyn’s most insightful comment while under observation at Bellevue was also the saddest: “I do all of my grieving on the inside and always see the good in people and not the bad.”

Judge Barrett, at the end of the hearing that found Evelyn not competent to stand trial, closed the proceedings with a plea: “Evelyn, if you will do what the doctors say, you will be back here and home in very short order. Do you understand me now? Will you promise me you will do that? You promise me and I will promise you then when I see you again I will send you home. Is that fair?”

Evelyn nodded. “I promise you that.”

Evelyn was committed to Matteawan state hospital in Beacon, New York, on 14 June 1950. She remained there for more than six years. Over time the anti-convulsive medication controlled her epilepsy, and her delusions faded away in 1952. Barrett died in 1956, their mutual promise broken by ill health on both sides.

On 19 November 1956, Cassity and Weiss finally judged Evelyn, now 32, to be sane. Instead of standing trial for Chaneta’s kidnapping, she pleaded guilty a month later. She received a suspended sentence on the condition she never set foot in New York state again. Her uncle, David Blanshaw, promised the court he would squire her back to Youngstown, Ohio, where Evelyn’s parents could care for her and see that she visited a psychiatric facility there on a regular basis.

Judge William Lyman asked Evelyn whether she was satisfied to have her lawyers, Hyman Rothbart and Marion O Jones, represent her. She muttered, “I want to go home,” and began to collapse. Court officials found her a chair, and once seated, she sobbed for the remainder of the hearing.

“If you come back to New York, you are going to go to state prison,” said Judge Lyman. “Is that clear to you?”

“Yes, your honor,” Evelyn replied.

David Blanshaw confirmed he would take Evelyn back to Ohio that very night, and that she would never come back to New York.

There is no evidence Evelyn ever did. From there, her whereabouts grow murky. The only proof of her death is in a younger sister’s 2013 obituary, indicating she had no surviving siblings. It seems likely, however, that Evelyn led a quieter life under a different name and died in close proximity to Youngstown, Ohio.

•••

The Holdens got on with their lives and raised their children – including two born after Chaneta – in New York and then in their North Carolina hometown. Anna died in 2000 at the age of 74. Clifford died eight years later, age 85. Jerry died in 2011 at 67.

The same age Chaneta Holden is now.

•••

Chaneta Holden asked that her current name and location not be published.

It took some coaxing to get her to respond to repeated emails, calls, and Facebook messages. “I’m glad to talk about this event from my past,” she finally told me in an email last month, “but I stopped using my first name years ago because of ridicule by peers when their parents informed them that I was the kidnapped child that the FBI was looking for.” She did not respond to subsequent communications.

For many years she was a nurse, first in the army, then in hospitals and private practice. Any major incidents in her life did not come close to prompting front-page news.

Chaneta’s story, in small part, answers a tantalizing question for those few hundred who shared her experience: how does being kidnapped as a newborn affect the rest of your life?

It’s a question that hasn’t been fully addressed, according to John Rabun. NCMEC has a family assistance unit, made up of social workers and psychologists, specifically devoted to family reunification. As a result, Rabun said, “we know a good bit about how the family’s doing for the first week and month, even up to two or three months.”

Some families keep in touch with NCMEC longer. Most don’t.

“In some ways, that’s healthy,” said Rabun. “They move on. The real family gets the child back; they assimilate as a family and don’t want to be reminded by us every week how they are doing.”

Even if there was a way to study the long-term effects on those abducted as infants, it might not yield much in the way of conclusions. An obvious one springs to mind: the longer they are away from their birth families, the greater chance of lasting damage.

Ann W Burgess, an expert in the effects of trauma and abuse, co-authored a study with Rabun and others on infant abductions through 2006. She described a case in Dover, Delaware, in which a husband and wife murdered a neighbor couple and kidnapped their nine-day-old son after having pretended for months they were expecting their own child.

The boy was recovered unharmed, but when Burgess spoke with his grandmother, she reported a peculiar reaction: every night, at around 10, the baby began to shiver. “That’s the exact time the baby would have been out in the cold with his mother, with just a diaper,” Burgess told me. “I always found it fascinating. Even lacking language, the baby’s memory system retained the event, and it took a while to subside.”

For Chaneta Holden, snatched from a hospital incubator and kept alive by her kidnapper’s home-brewed version, the extraordinary ending of her story was the chance to live an ordinary life.